[conspire] Floppy drive on today's Linux

[roger at rogerchrisman.com]

<rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> I suppose that's possible, but would you mind telling us on the basis of
> what observation you've reached that conclusion?

My general confusion with what was happening caused me to suspect
something was missing. Maybe floppy drive support is there after all.
Let's see...

Xubuntu puts a Floppy Drive icon on the Desktop (and in Places).

When I double click the Floppy Drive icon on the desktop with no disk
in the floppy drive I get this error pop up message:

   Mount Failed
       Unable to mount "Floppy Drive":
       mount: /dev/fd0 is not a valid block device

When I put a floppy in the drive and try again the pop up message is:

   Mount Failed
       Unable to mount "Floppy Drive":
       mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/fd0,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so

I've done these things so far:

1) I have installed the fdutils package

2) I added this line to /etc/fstab
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0

3) I turned Floppy Drive on in BIOS. (I had it turned off previously
because I wasn't using the floppy drive.)

4) And this works!:
sudo mount /dev/fd0 /mnt

My son says to tell you, "Thank you. Now it is working. So don't
worry." And now, "When are you going to be done with that darned
email?" So I'll wrap it up briefly.

The floppy we tried this on is formatted ext2 because, um, I think I
had set it up years ago as a CentOS boot disk.

The Xubuntu desktop icon works to access the disk _only_ after we mount it with
sudo mount /dev/fd0 /mnt

Trying to mount the disk by simply double clicking the drive icon
still gives the error messages mentioned above.

Only command line mounting works. Hurray for this. I wish the GUI
error message made sense to me. Does it make sense to you?

Indeed, thank you Rick!

Roger